


berenice

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Implied Future Character Death, M/M, Mild Implied Incest, Religious Content, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:10:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life becomes, unsurprisingly, an exercise in learning how to exist again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	berenice

Life becomes, unsurprisingly, an exercise in learning how to exist again.

The wounds make everything different. They intrude upon routine and ask politely to be circumvented and accommodated and Sam, in his exasperating fashion, makes it clear how much he hates feeling like a burden. Eventually Dean has to look him square in the eye and say, “The next time you bitch and moan about the best thing that ever happened to you, I’m gonna smack you upside the head.”

Dean only says that for Sam’s sake, because he knows Sam feels blessed to be this way, with his bleeding hands and feet and the pinpricks in his skull and the dull ache in his ribcage, the streaks of red that mar his back. Certainly, Dean doesn’t think this miracle is the best thing to have ever happened to Sam. He doesn’t see how this much pain and weakness and trouble can be a good thing.

But then, he’s never been a man of faith. He’s a man of practicalities. The slow transformation of his little brother into an effigy of Jesus Christ is about as far from _practical_ as Dean can possibly imagine.

For one thing, even the most basic of daily tasks have become difficult to accomplish now that Sam is bedridden, unable to do much except stare at the television or the crucifix on the opposite wall, or sleep. It’s becoming a chore even to eat, though Sam rarely complains of being hungry anymore. More often than not a glass of water held to his lips is enough. Dean wonders if Sam is learning to live off the grace that Castiel says is pervading his body; he certainly seems content enough.

In a way that confuses him, Dean is becoming accustomed to some of the new orders of life—the three or four trips to the bathroom per day with Sam’s weight slung over his shoulder like his very own cross of muscle and breath, the small bloody footprints they leave in their wake in a little breadcrumb trail between the tile and the bed. A stain is developing on most of Dean’s T-shirts, in the pocket of space between his hip and ribcage, where Sam’s hand comes to rest when they limp from place to place, where the seeping bandages fail to hold the blood back. Dean tries to wash it out but it’s surprisingly stubborn, a poppy-shaped badge of rusted black, pockmarking most of his wardrobe day by day.

Keeping clean is the biggest challenge, and it takes a lot of cajoling before Sam is comfortable letting Dean help him bathe. He manages himself for a while, until the holes in his hands make it hard to hold anything, let alone slippery soap or wet bottles. (Dean decided it was time to step in when he found Sam a week ago, just sitting in the cracked motel bathtub in water dyed solid scarlet, staring at the pale swimming reflections of his knees, his hair all stuck to his face and matted dark. Dean had swallowed back a lump of sudden sadness and bile at the sight of the crimson bathtub and helped Sam out and dried the blood from his hair and then dried the tears from his face and kissed him, and Sam hadn’t said a word. The whole bathroom still smells, days later, of flowers and incense, the strange and pungent _odour of sanctity_ Cas has told them about.)

After two first attempts with mixed results of trial-and-error, which at least made Sam laugh and cracked Dean’s first smile in ages, they’ve got the bath thing fairly down—it’s slow going, but at least in the end Sam feels clean and good and sleeps easy with fresh bandages, and Dean can rest knowing he’s done a little of what he is still able to do. He makes an effort to help Sam relax when he’s lying in the water with his head resting on the porcelain, makes jokes that edge on blasphemy given the miracle-du-jour, tells him anecdotes he’s heard on the phone with Bobby, idly wonders aloud what Cas is up to and when he’ll be by next, and sometimes Sam talks back and they converse, a little bit normal for just a precious while despite the holy stink and the water slowly turning carmine. But it never lasts, and Dean watches the days pass and Sam sink deeper and deeper into himself, folding his hands more often in prayer than Dean’s ever seen them, and he can’t help but be the slightest bit afraid that he’s going to have to watch Sam dissolve into his God entirely, that he’ll lose him before he’s ready.

He feels like he can be ready if only Sam will stick around until it’s time.

Cas comes by one day just as Dean is helping Sam into the bathroom, heavy with the weight of Sam’s closed mouth, and says he’ll wait in the room until they’re finished. Dean is glad to see him. Sam’s silence has become oppressive these past few days.

Sam sits down on the edge of the tub when the door is closed and together they gently work his clothes off, careful of his hands and feet, and Dean maneuvers his brother’s gangly limbs into the warm water, watching swirls of red spiral and float from his extremities as he sinks underneath it. He tries, as he cleans dried blood from Sam’s temples and squeezes polluted water from the washrag, to make small talk, get Sam to say something that sounds like himself, but either Sam is too tired or too weak to respond; all he gets back is a soft smile and fluttering eyelids and the shallow rise and fall of his ravaged chest. The marks have started to appear there, too, long red streaks beneath the skin that never break, as if someone’s taken a birch switch to Sam’s body in the night. Dean wishes he could take the washrag and scrub those away as well, like an eraser to a chalkboard.

If only it were that easy. He’d shake Sam like an Etch-a-Sketch if he could, until all the holes in him scattered and vanished and he had his smiling brother back again, the one who made jokes and ate too many vegetables for any self-respecting hunter and argued about where to spend the night, how to hunt the beast, how to save the world.

Even as he thinks it he feels a pinch of guilt. He loves Sam just as he is, of course, stigmatic and quiet, even if the love is twisted up in a knot of sadness so severe he wonders if he’ll ever get past it. He just finds it so hard to reconcile Sam’s pain with Sam’s happiness, the way the two go hand in hand in a union Dean can’t even begin to understand. He’s glad, selfishly, that he never has to comprehend holiness like this. Faith has always been Sam’s, and Sam’s mind works in the greys that allow him to make sense of it. Suffering and ecstasy, God and Death, while Dean watches the puzzle play out on his body, watches him sink like sand into himself, cleans his skin and his hair because there’s really nothing else he can do anymore.

Eventually he stops trying to make conversation and focuses on Sam, who has closed his eyes. His head is nodding as if he’s having trouble keeping it up. The water is steadily growing darker the longer he sits in it, and Dean has to stroke Sam’s hair out of his face for a good three minutes before his brother comes to himself enough to get up. Dean is beginning to feel sick at the way Sam has to balance on his heels to move anywhere, the way it makes his legs go taut. It looks so unnatural.

Dean forces himself to be numb in wrapping up Sam’s hands and feet and head with clean bandages, bearing him back into the room where Cas gets up off his seat with the air of one eager to be of help, and he lets Cas get Sam back into bed. He can feel himself creeping up to that razor’s edge of doing something stupid, like crying or throwing something or hurling an insult at someone who doesn’t deserve one, at someone like Sam or God, and he knows that’s not fair. It’s not their fault his brother’s too much of a damn saint to be upset about the way he’s dying.

And he is dying. Dean knows that. He’s known it in his bones ever since the first red bruise appeared on Sam’s right palm.

He watches Cas lay Sam’s head down and watches Sam’s eyelids flutter and his face grow slack with sleep, and he goes in to drain the bathtub. His hands are streaked with pink and the bath looks like a gaudy valentine and he knows with apathy that the hotel is going to charge them a hefty extra sum for the ruination of their towels. He figures he should do something about those. Wring them out, at least, to save the owners a little of the trouble.

Their room opens onto a bleak patch of lawn, facing away from any road or passerby, so when Dean is finished draining the tub of Sam’s blood and washing his hands, he gathers the white-struck-red fabric in his arms and goes outside, walking past the bed where Cas sits nearby, watching over Sam’s rest. Dean pauses in the doorway for just a moment, looking at them; the soft white evening is laid over them like a gentle hand, glancing off the tiny metal of Christ on his opposite crucifix in the way that the sun glances off water. They’re both so calm and pale. He feels, suddenly, very out of place, with his arms full of red cloth and his heart stammering like Moses. He goes outside.

There is a distant rush of traffic, the sound of grasshoppers singing in the tall grass on this unkempt side of the hotel. The air smells like grease and cigarette smoke and Dean relishes it, lets the fug of it sit heavy on his tongue, a dismal but welcome respite from the incessant smell of flowers and divinity in that little package of a room. Every time he has to breathe that scent is a reminder that Sam’s pain is bigger than he can fathom and those reminders are a chisel to his resolve. Out here the sky is big and the world is moving, and he can wring out towels and he can breathe.

He twists them up one by one and watches the blood squeeze and splatter onto the edge of the concrete walkway, wetting the dirt to darkness and then soaking away. It runs down his arms and he shakes it off, breathes through his mouth so as not to catch the smell. There are more towels than he’d realised and he counts mentally the number of times he’s dried Sam’s body off in that stale bathroom, the hollow sweet angles of his brother’s skeleton.

He wrings and wrings and surprises himself, not for the first time, just how much blood is in a human being. How much can come from four little holes and a dozen tiny pricks salted like stars around a skull. More than he’d ever imagined. And it just keeps coming, he thinks, putting aside one towel (now more pink than red) and picking up another, twisting it, feeling the cold damp sliding sluggishly down his skin. The wounds never stop bleeding. Cas says that’s normal, that they’re not supposed to stop, but Dean thinks of how much blood is in a human being and how long Sam has been hurting and thinks, _there can’t be much left._

He imagines Sam’s veins, like an anatomy textbook drawing, emptying of red. Like tubes of paint. Imagines the little cartoon heart gasping for air as all the life drains away. Imagines all this while the cartoon face of his brother looks up at the sky with that stupid look of contentment on it, while little cartoon cherubs herald him with little cartoon trumpets until his outline lifts off the page and into the clouds and leaves his empty veins behind, just another set of scientific facts, with no Sam in them, even though Sam is the important part. First faith and now nature—nothing can get his brother right.

Dean doesn’t realise he’s crying, or that he’s stopped wringing the goddamn towels, until he feels Castiel’s hand on his shoulder like a bolt of lightning, and comes to himself. He’s sunk to his knees on the pavement, bloody hands on his knees, tears trembling off his chin. Pink fabric in abandoned mounds on his left. He looks up at Cas and thinks foolishly that the angel just won’t see how upset he is, that the old Dean Winchester brand of swallowing one’s feelings will magic away the tears, but of course he’s long past that. He has to look away immediately from Castiel’s stupid huge concerned blue eyes, focus on a line of ants vanishing into the weeds, to save himself from sobbing right then and there.

He thinks, _this is Sam’s blood all over my hands,_ and reaches for one of the ruined towels without knowing what he expects to gain, fingers shaking. All he ends up accomplishing is smearing more of it into his skin, smudging it everywhere, and Cas takes the towel away, helps him to his feet. Dean feels a thumb drying the tears from his face but can’t even look at him.

He wishes very suddenly that he hadn’t wrung out those towels. Sam’s blood is soaking into the ground. He needs that blood and now it’s wasted.

When he buckles, Castiel is a relief against which he can fall, and he doesn’t say anything. Dean is grateful that Cas knows enough of him to know that there’s nothing to be said. The edge of his forehead rests on his friend’s shoulder, Cas’ strong upright stolen skeleton, the most stable thing Dean has been able to rest against in weeks.

He feels blood dripping slowly from his fingertips to mar the sidewalk in unfathomable constellations.

“Come inside,” Cas says softly. Unspoken but implied in the way he says it is, _I won’t leave,_ and Dean’s never been so grateful for company in his life.

The problem, he thinks—as Cas leads him back into the room, back into the smell and the white angles of Sam’s sleeping body on the bed—is the learning. Pushing and pulling their lives around the pain. Teaching themselves how to eat and move and breathe with Sam’s goddamn sainthood leaning down over their heads. Sam, learning how to exist again, how to operate in the hurt and the blood and the clouded litany of his faith, his stupid unflappable belief, his upward pull to his own salvation.

Dean, learning how to exist in a little room, learning to breathe around his heart in his throat. Understanding a little more, day by day, that the world is marching forward, and that it has no time for saints to stop and be, and that soon enough he’ll leave this hotel and its bloodstained bathroom and its watchful crucifix, its cloying smell and bedside Bible and heavy pall. Understanding that this will happen, and he will move, he will leave the miracle behind.

But Sam won’t.

—

In the very early morning before the sun has risen, Dean goes outside to pick up the towels he’d left on the ground, his whole body numb with the things he knows, and finds every single one of them as clean as the day they’d rented the place. One by one he examines them by moonlight for stains and finds none, and when he is shaking out the final cloth he thinks he sees, just faintly, an image of something imprinted in faint rust-brown upon its fibres, like the shadow of a thin-boned much-beloved face.

But of course, he can’t be sure.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction). 
> 
> St Berenice, or Veronica, wiped Christ's face with her veil as he walked to Calvary, and an image of his face was left behind on its surface.


End file.
